at the top of the show, we asked you, why are you awake? producer john tower, a couple of your answers this morning. j.t.? >> mike. i'd love to tell you that i'm up to watch the show, but i just put the tv on to pass the time while i wait for the liquor store to open. i'm out of vodka. >> the first 15,000 viewers get a free bottle of vodka. barnicle will take care of everybody. >> she writes simply, okay, me likey. >> i think this just got weird. we'll be right back with "morning joe" beginning right now. ♪

and finally today, a rare 76-carat diamond went up for auction in switzerland. the jeweler call it had a priceless stone while david petraeus's wife call it had a start. >> ladies and gentlemen, there's news from the world of auction houses. news from the world of auction houses, christie's, last night auctioned off a 76-carat diamond. yep. i believe it was purchased by general petraeus for his wife. i believe. >> a huge story in the news right now, the general petraeus scandal. you all following that? oh, yeah. since general petraeus had an affair with his biographer, did you hear this, people are snapping up copies of the book. yeah. yeah, the book is available in hard cover and extremely hard cover. >> all right. morning. it's wednesday, november 14th. i'm mike barnicle in for joe, mika and willie. joining us on set nbc news peter

alexander off the road covering the romney campaign. >> you forgot to shave. >> i know, i did, i woke up late and forgot. national affairs editor and political analyst john heilemann, "time" senior political analyst mark halperin and assistant editor and columnist for "the financial times," jillian tet. the contest for viewers to figure out whose career will implode on the set because of something said or done. it won't be yours because you're much too cautious. it won't be yours. my candidate is john heilemann. >> i'm the front-runner, although they made it -- supposedly donny deutsch was supposed to be here today, and whatever, he's drunk or, you know, wherever he is, rehab. >> 9-5 odds. >> if donny had been here, you know, the career demolition thing would have been close to 100% likely, both of us going down in a flaming heap of muck. >> donny didn't want to be here because he didn't want to get adored sitting in a coffee shop

on madison avenue which he does nearly every morning. here we are. it's going to be a good show. peter? president obama is scheduled to hold his first post-election news conference, expected to face a barrage of questions about general david petraeus's admitted affair, the time line of this investigation and when exactly the president was told about it. meanwhile, the white house says the president still has faith in john allen, the current u.s. commander in afghanistan who is now under investigation by the pentagon's inspector general for what officials describe as potentially inappropriate e-mails with one of the women directly involved in the case. nbc's chief foreign affairs correspondent, andrea mitchell, has more on an ever-widening story. >> reporter: the scandal involving two very different women, tampa socialite jill kelley and petraeus biographer and former mistress paula broadwell ensnared not only petraeus but his successor. marine general john allen who

took over from petraeus in afghanistan and is the president's choice to be supreme allied commander of nato forces in europe, a nomination now temporarily on hold. >> thank you for all that you have done, for me and for our precious daughters. >> reporter: the general is married with a sterling record. but on a flight to australia monday night, aides to defense secretary leon panetta disclosed a dramatic turn in the petraeus case. fbi investigators had uncovered what the pentagon called potentially inappropriate communications between the general and jill kelley whom he and his wife got to know in tampa and were revealing between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of documents including e-mails over two years. officials say some were flirtatious, but the general strongly denies an improper relationship. the fbi discovered the e-mails during its investigation of kelley's e-mails, sparked by her complaints about anonymous threats which turned out to be from paula broadwell. they say they found no wrongdoing by general allen but turned the files over to the

pentagon which monday ordered its inspector general to investigate. a social link between the two four-star generals, jill kelley who enjoyed socializing with the powerful in tampa while doing volunteer work for military families. she also gave people the impression she had some kind of state department status which officials say she does not. in fact, last weekend, she called police complaining about media visitors including nbc. at one point invoking diplomatic-type privileges. >> i am an honorary consul-general, so i have inviablity. they're on private property. i don't know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well. >> reporter: kelley's friendship with both generals had benefits. in september petraeus and allen both wrote letters to the court handling kelley's twin sister's bitter child custody case to vouch for the sister. another friend of kelley's, the fbi agent who helped launch the investigation that eventually forced petraeus to resign. he is now the subject of an

ethics inquiry after the fbi found he had sent kelley pictures with his shirt off. months before the fbi was brought onto the case. >> that was nbc's andrea mitchell reporting. some lawmakers are defending -- demanding that petraeus testify at some point about the deadly attack at the u.s. consulate in benghazi which he independently investigated. by the way, we'll be handing out those license plates at the end of the broadcast. >> you could partner next to the ballpark. >> the honorary consul. >> ain't nothing better than invioability. >> this is something you can get on demand like watching "homeland." you were shaking your head, though. >> i must admit, i am mesmerized by this. this is a week where we're supposed to be all talking about the fiscal cliff, the deficit, but the reality is talking about the fiscal cliff and tax reform is a bit like eating spinach. you know it's good for you. you know you ought to do it. it's actually quite hard work. whereas now we're given the equivalent of sort of nonstop

ice cream sundaes in the media world. it's fascinating and it's a lot of fun to watch but also very tragic in many ways. >> yeah, tragic is an understatement. there is a war going on in afghanistan. people's lives are still in peril. american lives as well as obviously afghan lives. and this is what we're talking about. the president has a press conference later today, correct? >> 1:30 eastern time. during "andrea mitchell reports." >> what's the over/under in terms of time when someone finally gets to something substantive like withdrawal from afghanistan, like the fiscal cliff as opposed to paula broadwell, petraeus and allen? 15 minutes? >> i predict our colleagues will play a game of chicken and in fact start with the fiscal cliff and serious stuff. >> john's not as optimistic. >> i think the fiscal cliff will come on the fifth question. >> that's going to be the spinach, isn't it? >> ladbrooks. >> someone reached out to me yesterday and said just consider mitt romney had won, he said

he'd be focused exclusively on the economy, president-elect for a day and a half and then a sex scandal breaks out with his top generals. that would have been interesting to see how governor romney handled that moment. >> the other aspect of this story that i assume the country will get to, the media will get to quite quickly is the surveillance tape. i mean, this is pretty scary stuff. some of your e-mails to me and mine back to you, i don't want anybody reading them. >> yeah, that would be bad. you know, and it's interesting. here's the surveillance -- the architects of the surveillance tape caught up in the surveillance tape. that's the kind of thing that's so fascinating about it. >> but one of the fascinating degrees is the degrees to which broadwell and petraeus went to lengths to try and stop their e-mails being traced, by using this system of saving in the draft folder in their e-mail accounts and stuff. so they were clearly aware of the risk of being watched. and yet they still went ahead and sent e-mails on an extraordinary scale. and you've got to ask questions

about these are people who are trained in intelligence matters, and yet even they can't forget about the dangers of using e-mail. and what does that mean for the rest of us? >> i know what it means for them. it means that neither one of them knew a 15-year-old who could have told them how to get around having their e-mails discovered. >> "wall street journal" has some of the fresher reporting today on this including some of the things about the e-mails for those interested in every detail. i recommend you plunk down whatever "the journal" costs. >> you want to read it while peter continues with the news? >> we've got information about like the names on the accounts. >> the level of preparation for this show is fantastic. >> according to "the wall street journal" miss broadwell writing under the pseudonym "kelley patrol." one word, capital "p." kelleypatrol. >> i think most americans are surprised to know their e-mails exist for that length of time.

i think they think they disappear when they hit delete. clearly that's not the case. >> to go back to what jillian said, that's the incredible thing. you would have thought that people who were as intimately involved in this, as sophisticated as these people are who were aware that they had something to hide would also have done some rudimentary googling on the question of exactly how difficult it is to get -- to delete e-mail. to get those e-mails out of the cloud, you know. they're on gmail. like today -- yes, it's not classified, and it's also not secure. it's a service owned by another company where things disappear. they didn't think maybe some of these things get archived in places that were not necessarily on your hard drive? you know, this is not a group of high i.q. people when it comes to the technology that they were using to try to evade the surveillance state that they built. it's amazing. >> the other thing i find amazing is i remember going through the u.s. treasury in the height of the financial crisis, and back then, you had officials who were scribbling down important facts and figures on

scrap paper because that was one of the few things they were able to legally throw away and get rid of. and if you go around other branches of the u.s. government today, people are intensely aware of the risks of e-mails being kept. if you go and talk to private sector banks, nobody working on a bank trading floor these days can possibly not be aware of the risks of tracking thoughts and e-mails. and yet somehow the military just seems not to have noticed this. it is very, very striking. >> there's one other dedataidei this "journal" story, kelley had second thoughts. and people said they made the request, quote, she was worried about the personal information being provided to investigators. >> like the diplomatic license plates. >> talk about the horse after it's left the barn door. >> you predicted fiscal cliff would be the fifth question. it's going to be our second topic today. we turn to the fiscal cliff now where the white house is showing its cards and sending a message ahead of the president's

face-to-face meeting with republican congressional leaders on friday. president obama plans to open negotiations by calling for a $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenue over the next decade. that amount is likely far more than republicans would be willing to accept and double the amount that speaker boehner had offered the president during their debt negotiations last year. today the president is scheduled to meet with ceos from a dozen companies. there's some of them on your screen. general electric, ford, ibm all playing a part. they'll discuss ways to work together and try to find a balanced approach to reducing the deficit. during a closed-door meeting yesterday with union leaders and liberal supporters, president obama reportedly vowed that he would, quote, not budge when it comes to letting the bush tax cuts expire for the country's highest earners. labor leader and president of the afl-cio, richard trumka, was among those at the white house meeting. he said he and the president are on the same page. >> we're very, very committed to

making sure that the middle class and workers don't end up paying the tab for a party that we didn't get to go to. the president led with that notion of protecting the middle class, and now you have republicans that have it in their power, they could sign a bill tomorrow that protects the middle class. we'll see what they can. are we going to push them on that? without a doubt we're going to push them on that. are we going to collectively stand up and make sure that workers get a fair shake in all of this? absolutely we are. do we believe that the president is committed to that same thing? absolutely we do. also congressman paul ryan is dismissing suggestions that president obama's victory gives his administration a mandate to raise taxes on the rich. returning to capitol hill yesterday for the first time since the election, ryan pointed the republicans keeping control of the house as a sign that the country isn't sold on the democrats' agenda. take a listen to this. >> whether the people intended or not, we've got divided government.

>> you don't think there's a mandate here? >> i don't because then they would have put nancy pelosi in charge of the house of representatives. see, i think these ideas that we talked about, i think they're popular ideas. this is a very close election. and unfortunately, divided government didn't work very well the last two years. we're going to have to make sure it works in the next two years. that means, i think, that both parties have to talk to each other. >> but could you see yourself supporting a plan that raises tax rates? >> i'm not for raising tax rates. >> so you won't support a plan? >> i don't want to get into negotiating with the media, but i do not support raising tax rates. >> period. >> yeah, i've been saying that my entire career. >> the fiscal cliff. i mean, there are people -- you read them, you hear them, say, you know, let us go off the fiscal cliff. that might be one way to really resolve the situation. what happens if we go off the fiscal cliff? what is the fiscal cliff? >> well -- >> i can't even balance a checking account. what is it? >> it's actually more like 2 1/2 cliffs because you have three things happening in the next few months. you have the bush-era tax cuts

expiring. you have the obama stimulus tax cuts expiring. you've got a collection of the spending increases that were agreed last year coming into force. and you've also got -- sorry, spending cuts coming into force. and you've also got the debt ceiling in the sense that congress is going to have to get permission to issue more bonds. and those three things coming together create a very nasty shock. and essentially if you do nothing, if you let the spending cuts happen, if you have the tax cuts roll off and you have essentially tax increases, you'll get a hit that's worth 3% to 4% worth of gross domestic production, and that will almost certainly push the economy back into recession. so there's an awful lot at stake right now. what paul ryan said is very interesting because we had an editorial on monday from glenn hubbard, mitt romney's economic adviser, essentially saying that yes, we recognize we need to talk about tax increases for the rich. i mean, he actually stressed that that should be the starting point of a discussion.

he didn't say, glenn hubbard, that he increases -- he wants to see increases in tax rates. he was looking at closing loopholes, things like that, but he was willing to put that on the table. the problem, though, is that even if advisers like glenn hubbard are saying that, what we're seeing is people like paul ryan still very much signaling strong opposition to that idea. >> what's your head count in the senate, the number of republicans -- >> in the senate? >> yeah. >> i think the senate will pass whatever the leaders agree to. i think like with most of these things now, they'll have to go to the house floor without knowing -- without the votes. the question is who can you lose and still pass it? you'll lose some liberal democrats, but i think you're going to get a base support of democrats. and the question is, you'll have to have boehner, and i think you'll probably have to have cantor. can you lose paul ryan? i think almost anyone who wants to run for president in '16 is going to vote against this on the republican side. and so the question is, you know, who do you need?

and i don't think you absolutely need paul ryan. but in the end, i think he'll vote for what's passed even with tax increases. >> speaking, as long as we're on the house as opposed to the senate, do you hear anything nancy pelosi is going to have a news conference, a press conference, later today? what do you think she's going to do? any word? >> i have no idea. no idea. >> thank you for your honesty. go get me a cup of coffee. >> did you watch this program yesterday? debbie wassermann schultz said she's staying. most of the people i talk to say she's staying. i think her body language yesterday when she was sparring with the press a little bit suggest she's staying. and if we're wrong, i won't be here tomorrow. >> let's go back to congressman ryan and his comments. the interesting thing that president obama did yesterday, he's been, you know, criticized -- was criticized a lot from a lot of different angles in the first four years of his time in office. but one of the things that the left and some in the center criticized him for was constantly negotiating against himself, that he was not a

tactical negotiator. yesterday was as much as anything an announcement. he's not going to get the tax increases that he wants. that number. but he's not coming in -- he's coming in setting the bar really high on the assumption that he's going to have to end up lower which is actually how most people do conduct negotiations generally instead of starting what you want and then getting it pared back. congressman ryan, you know, i don't really understand how you cannot understand the president's election as a mandate for raising taxes on rich people. only because the president campaigned on almost nothing else specifically. i mean, there were very few specifics. and we criticized president obama throughout the campaign for not being specific about very much. he was very specific about that. and he not only won re-election in a convincing way, but if you look at the exit polls, and again, i know that congressman ryan doesn't want to look at those exit polls because they're brutal for the republican side. the exit polls showed overwhelming support for that proposition, raising taxes on rich people. two-thirds of the country's in favor of it.

there's not much that there's a clear mandate for out of this election besides that. >> elections have consequences. jillian? >> but the key issue is, it's one thing to say yes, we want to raise taxes rich people. the really critical question now is how. are you going to raise rates by letting the bush-era tax cuts expire, or are you going to try and deal with loopholes? and it matters because raising rates is a very fast way of getting more revenue. you can get that money in quickly. talking about changing loopholes is a very messy, long discussion. and that could take a long time. and if you think back to 1984, i mean, talk about two years to actually get serious reform of the tax code implemented even when you had a fairly cooperative atmosphere. if a debate now shifts to plugging loopholes, this could drag on a long, long time. >> the critical question off of heilmann's point is paul ryan and other republicans, do they ever look outdoors and realize what people are doing with their lives? do they understand what's happened and the reality on the

street, apparently not off of his comments. shut up, we've got to do this. >> glenn hubbard, a lot of republicans getting on board on this idea. coming up, in addition to heilmann, film director oliver stone. actress and director penny marshall, senator dick durbin and moderator of "meet the press," david gregory. up next, the top stories in the "politico playbook." first, though, is bill karins with -- what were you saying earlier? dreadful forecast coming up? >> it's not going to be a dramatic forecast. nothing drastic, nothing disturbing. we're actually looking at a nice tranquil weather pattern for once. no snow, no big rainstorms and hopefully no coastal storms either. a little question mark on that. the forecast getting you out the door this morning, much colder in new england than it was at this time yesterday morning. definitely need the hat and the gloves and the winter coat for the kids and maybe even yourself. temperatures in the 30s. windchills in the 20s. sunshine this afternoon, though. bring the sunglasses, doing any extensive drive. because the sun angle's getting a little lower in the sky.

by the way, last night, the aurora borealis, the northern lights, was spectacular about midnight. northern portions of vermont, new hampshire, maine, wisconsin and the great lakes, a lot of great pictures online of the fantastic event. also temperatures in the middle of the country continue to be nice and chilly, in the 30s in many areas. then as far as what we'll do as we go throughout wednesday afternoon, we recover nicely in most spots. and finally, talking about next week, monday through wednesday, possibility of a next weather threat. the good news is, this is trending further off the coast. still a possibility of a threat, though, for new england as we go through tuesday, wednesday, we'll watch that carefully. maturity level is astounding. all right. we're leaving you with a shot of 30 rock. it looks like we took down the big, big spruce. third tree arriving at rockefeller plaza. you're watching "morning joe." we're brewed by starbucks. lists all done. raise the roof!

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space. space. [ male announcer ] download zeebox free, and let your tv go where it's never gone before. that's not a good way to start. >> was that your ride this morning? >> let's take a look at the "morning papers" this morning. from "the wall street journal," the head of the long island power authority is stepping down. a move he says has been planned for months. >> of course it has. >> his utility company, one of new york's largest, has been facing tough criticism for its response to superstorm sandy which knocked out electricity to nearly 1 million customers. the resignation announcement comes one day after governor andrew cuomo ordered a commission to investigate how utility companies handle the disaster. how about poorly. >> flipping pages on the calendar, you know what? december 31st was my out date. "usa today" a crucial test on

wall street for the social networking giant facebook. more than 750 million shares of the facebook ipo become unlocked. they are available for sale, sparking fears of a massive selloff. facebook, by the way, has lost about half its value since it went public in may. apparently no zuckerberg public sightings today. >> that's because general petraeus used e-mail instead of facebook. >> exactly. >> "new york times," france is now considering a plan to arm opposition forces in syria after becoming the first western power to fully recognize the rebel coalition. it's seen as an effort to help align anti-government fighters whose lack of unity is blamed in part for helping president al asad stay in power. >> and from our parade of papers, "the chicago tribune," toyota is recalling 2.75 million vehicles. among them, certain models of the popular hybrid the prius. the recalls stem from problems with the vehicle's steering mechanism. and in the case of the hybrids,

the system's water pump, this is the second multicar recall by toyota in the last two months. joining us now with the "politico playbook," executive editor jim vandehei. jim, good morning to you. >> morning, guys. how you doing? >> doing good. you described the tactic in the fiscal cliff negotiations as sort of a game of good cop/bad cop between mcconnell and john boehner. can you help explain that? >> mitch mcconnell who runs the senate republican caucus, he's definitely playing the role of the bad cop in that he does not want to compromise at all on tax cuts, has taken a much more hard-line approach, has the bulk of his time talking to "the wall street journal" editorial page, basically speaking to the base. where you have speaker boehner talking in much more conciliatory tones and talking about getting a deal. i think that's going to be the dynamic. mitch mcconnell is up for re-election in 2014.

in a very conservative state where it's not inconceivable the tea party would run somebody against him if he does not take a hard-line approach. people need to remember that as these negotiations unfold. for boehner, he wants a deal. i do want to comment a second on the interview you had with paul ryan. ryan might not think that there is a mandate, but the president does, congressional democrats do, and the public does, if you look at polling. and there's zero chance that the president is going to compromise on this, which is why i think there's a decent chance all the tax cuts go away at the end of the year. the president put down a marker yesterday saying $1.6 trillion in total revenue that he wants to raise. i don't think that's the real number. i think that's a negotiated number. but you know the floor is $800 billion because that's what he had last year when he had a much weaker hand. so the number falls in between 800 and $1.6 trillion. you can't get to that number by just closing loopholes. there's no way congress is going

to get rid of the charitable tax deduction. there's no way that we're going to change the dynamics in the housing market when the housing market is starting to recover by getting rid of the mortgage tax deduction in totality. so if you take those two off the table, there's not that much loophole money to be had. so you have to change rates. and i think there's 0% chance the president is going to compromise on that, which is why this sort of blink moment for congress and the white house is only going to become more of a white-knuckle moment. >> jim, let's stay on this topic. and i can see grover norquist out there. what's the deal with him and the strength that he has had in past congresses, with past people in public office and his strength or his perceived strength today on this debate? >> there's no doubt he has strength and has perceived strength. it's weaker today than it was before the election. i think the republican party from bobby jindal on down is rethinking its rigid stance on a lot of issues including taxes,

including immigration. that doesn't mean that suddenly the republican party's going to be for raising taxes. but let's be clear. when john boehner says, i'm open to raising revenues, he had on the table a proposal to raise taxes. that's what it means when you're raising revenues. they can spin it any way they want, it's raising taxes by $800 billion. so the republican party, in a growing number of folks in the republican party, are on record for raising taxes. and they know the number's going to have to be above 800. that's the floor from last year. i think the actual number will be 1.2 which will be the middle ground between 800 and $1.6 trillion. you don't get to $1.2 trillion without either raising tax rates or changing how we tax investment, which is the reason that a lot of rich people end up paying a very low tax rate. people like mitt romney can pay an effective tax rate of 10% to 15% because so much of their income comes from long-term investment holdings. something has to give. you have to change those things if you want to raise that type of revenue. >> we've talked a lot about the tax side of this, but there's

spending cuts that need to be dealt with. no one wants the automatic sequester cuts for national security purposes, and they're too big in the short term, but where are the spending cuts going to come from? >> they're one of the thorny bits. back to the tax issue quickly because part of the logic in washington right now is that if you do go over that fiscal cliff and have the automatic rise in tax rates on january 1st, one good thing is from the republican point of view, they will essentially be able to blame all of that on the democrats. then you're talking about a very different position from which to be negotiating because if you have the tax increases, at least you can then talk about well, maybe you're going to try and roll some of that back. it changes the dynamic. on the spending side, though, that's going to be very messy because actually the type of spending cuts that are coming in play are the automatic sequestration are certainly not what any economist would suggest would be good for the economy right now. i mean, cutting defense in that very crude way is going to hit

manufacturing jobs, confidence in quite a lot of the industrial complex, and that's not going to be good at all. >> "politico's" jim havandehei, thanks, bud. the marlins trade away practically their squire squad. literally two guys left over from last year's starters at the top of the season. we'll get barnicle's take on the purge and what he thinks of marlins' owner jeff loria next in sports as the a.l. east only gets more stacked. >> why do you care? >> because it's baseball. [ male announcer ] this is bob,

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welcome back to "sportscenter." big news out of major league baseball. this guy will be talking about this for a while. sorry, your a.l. east just got loaded. >> this is obscene. >> a disappointing season after moving into their new stadium in miami. the marlins have decided to purge their payroll again and send most of their remaining talent to the toronto blue jays. espn reports that the marlins have agreed to trade former all-stars jose reyes, josh johnson, mark buehrle and two other players to the jays in a move that will slash $160 million from the team's payroll. this is just the latest firesale for the fish who are known for

their slash and burn approach to roster j. all-star slugger hanley ramirez was dealt to the dodgers at this season's trade deadline. look at this. we built this for you. of the nine names -- you didn't build that. the nine games of the starting lineup in game one of the 2012 season, only two of them remain. the entire starting infield has been purged. there are fifth gradesers acros south florida trying to figure out who to root for. they spent $191 million. most of those players have disappeared. this latest megadeal may have south florida taxpayers feeling duped. public funds accounted for $360 million of the 515 million bucks it took to build the marlins' new home. attendance, by the way, slumped badly after the midseason selloff. total attendance figures for the marlins last year were the lowest for any first-year ballpark in the last three decades. this is my favorite part.

ready? the marlins' best player, stanton, voiced his frustration, he tweeted, "alright, i'm pissed off, plain and simple." >> he could be the first player in the history of baseball, 40 home runs and 40 rbis, he's going to have no one on base ahead of him. the winter ownerings meetings, major league baseball owners meetings, start today in chicago. and i would not be surprised if this was point one on the table among these owners. because this guy, the owner of the marlins, jeff loria, has raped this franchise repeatedly. and this time at the expense of, as you pointed out, the taxpayers of dade county in florida, building a brand-new stadium and then -- this is ridiculous. get the team out of there. >> this is the most unprincipled, ridiculous argument that's ever made. all of those things may be true. but the only reason you're saying this, number one, the only reason -- >> because i wanted josh johnson. >> because all those guys are on the jays and it's going to be

that much harder for the red sox to make it to the playoffs. last year when the red sox dumped payroll, that's fantastic. >> we don't play in a taxpayer-assisted ballpark. take a look at what loria and what the general manager were saying a year ago. when they got the new ballpark accounted, it was just about to open, they were signing these players, we're in this for the future, for the fans. first of all, the team can't be supported. they're not going to support the team in miami, get them out of there. >> are you trying to say that the baseball owner lied to the fans in public? that's shocking on "sportscenter." >> you're going to be banned from the set. you're this close. >> this is going well so far. to the nba, the knicks, the last undefeated team in basketball, jeremy lin who is what they're saying in first quarter, on the fastbreak. anthony ahead of the defense, throws down the one-handed jam.

anthony led the team with 25 points. 8 boards on the night. >> they haven't played anybody. >> let's jump ahead to the fourth. raymond felton and tyson chandler, alley-oop. knicks beat the magic 99-89, improve to 5-0 on the season. this is the third 5-0 start in franchise history for the knicks. >> likely to go 82-0. >> it would be awesome p they played a team that was, you know, an actually an nba team. >> classic new york story. >> who plays for orlando anymore? >> the magic are not. >> that's true. >> hardly magical. coming up next, the "must-read opinion pages." you're watching "morning joe" brewed by starbucks. y'all can finish that conversation. with the spark cash card from capital one,

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mika in the south of france. >> sent them by telex. >> that's a word out of the past. thank you, mark halperin. maureen dowd, reputation, reputation, reputation. it is disturbing that an ethically sketchy, politically motivated fbi agent could spark an incendiary federal investigation tunnelling into private lives to help a woman he liked and later blow it up to hurt a president he didn't like. it's also worrisome that the nation's spymaster who had presided in the military where adultery could result in court-martial could not have found a more clandestine manner of talking naughty to his biograph

biographer, baby, than a gmail drop box used by terrorists, teenagers and authors. the scandal is a good reminder that although mccain and palin earned total trust, these guys are human beings working under extremely stressful circumstances, and their judgments are not beyond reproach. one of the elements of the story that hasn't been referred to greatly in all of the coverage because of the obvious, that's atop the coverage, is the repeated assignments to iraq and afghanistan. not only among the brass but obviously the deployments, among the troops, seven, eight, nine deployments. it takes -- exacts a crushing burden on families. >> i mean, in the heart of this whole story, we shouldn't forget that there are real family tragedies here, and there are families who are being ripped apart not just by this immediate story but by the pressure of trying to do the job and the

strains on people that have led into this bhowhole scandal are y significant and they need to be discussed more openly and acknowledged. >> you think about the amount of time petraeus spent in theater. he was out of the country for years on end. someone around here the other day was saying, you know, 4 out of 6 years at one point where he was not at home. you know, there's not a lot of marriages that, you know, will emerge normal, if not totally dysfunctional, that's a hard thing to do. that's a hard thing to do. >> and this particular -- now, i mean, everyone feels so badly, i would think, for mrs. petraeus, but this marriage isn in the spotlight because of his celebrity and the glamour that's been attached to him and everything like that. but ordinary soldiers, ordinary marines, deployment after deployment after deployment, they're not making a lot of money, folks. and the burden on the spouse staying here, raising children

and whatever is just back breaking. >> the divorce rate is particularly high for families that return home. obviously, they face the challenge of finding work when they return home. they face the challenge of trying to rekindle a marriage in situations like that. we were talking in the break about some of the details you learn about general petraeus. and i think some of the coverage has been interesting how it's viewed general petraeus as the victim so often and her as sort of the, you know, plying him with sexy notes, paula broadwell. specifically some of these e-mails referred to him in the evening liked to have apple pie served to him, mariah carey coming home in a fancy hotel room and demanding all-white m&m's. the inner workings of high-level generals are fascinating, too. >> there's a fascinating group in the uk looking at the psychology of what happens to people in power and also looking at the neuroscience about what being in power does to your brain. and there's something intoxicating about being surrounded by people who are praising you, about being little

bubble, where every need is met, where everyone tells you you're wonderful and they scurry and find things for you whether it's freshed slice pineapple, papers, whether it's a driver. and i think so often in the last few decades we've seen stories of usually men, not always, who get into this kind of diva mode and essentially it's a slippery slope. you don't wake up one day and say, i believe my own hype. i have to have freshly sliced pineapple. but it's very gradual. and there's a real need for everyone to watch out much more carefully what's happening to leaders when they get into power. >> i knew barnicle had gone around the bend when i came in this morning and he was asking me to peel him a grape. the power's just gone to your head, bud day. >> start with a banana. >> we had asked an intern to bring in barnicle's pineapple but it didn't make it just yet. you write about the budget game. we'll read in part what you might. "hundreds of people from san jose, a cash-strapped city in california will embark on a curious modern experiment. san jose's citizens will be

invited to play with the city's budge for a day using pretend money. the hope is that by logging into these computing-cum-budget exercises, residents will become better informed about how their budget and city work, and that, in turn, should make them more engaged in crucial policy choices. should the city save money by reducing its firemen on trucks or bite the bullet and raise taxes instead? a cynic might dismiss this as a marketing or political gimmick, but if nothing else, the experiment is distinctly thought-provo thought-provoking." i'm curious your thoughts because in your essay you also talk about switzerland. they obviously face unique comparisons to the united states. we're a far larger cannot tri wi country with a lot more poverty than they face. what is your belief of why it would work here? >> it's been tried in brazil, but the idea is you get people at a local level together to understand the importance of tradeoffs. if you ask people in surveys, what do you want to cut?

they say nothing. if you say okay, you're going to have to choose what to cut amongst these alternatives and do that as a group, you start negotiations, and you make people much more realistic about what the reality is. and in san jose, for example, they discovered actually the citizens really want to hang on to their libraries, but they were happy to cut people in fire trucks from 5-4. and actually they've done that now to save money. if only you could do that in washington. the question is how do you do that on a federal level? the reason why the swiss model is interesting is because when you have small units when people feel like a group, you can have real democracy, and you can get people talking about tradeoffs. how do you do that in a country like america which is so vast and in washington which is so sprawling? the swiss do this because they are tiny, and they do have real sense of local democracy. but trying to transplant that into the american situation's going to be hard. >> you know, there's already a group actually that's doing that and using pretend money to work these issues out. unfortunately, they're in the congress of the united states.

anyway. speaking of the congress of the united states, we have senate majority whip dick durbin coming up about the president's strategy headed into friday's fiscal cliff meeting with republican leaders. all of that and more including more on the miami marlins when we come back. lists all done. raise the roof! no one says that anymore, mom. [ woman ] raise the roof! ah? raise the roof! [ male announcer ] it's our biggest toy rollback of the year. find hundreds of rollbacks on the season's hottest toys in stores now, from america's gift headquarters, walmart. governor of getting it done. you know how to dance... with a deadline. and you...rent from national. because only national lets you choose any car in the aisle... and go.

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the general, his biographer, his successor and his former deputy have all been cut in some big sexy-time scandal, but that's it! >> further complicating the case, officials say the fbi agent who first launched the investigation, a friend of kelley's, is now himself the subject of an internal fbi probe. for suspected inappropriate behavior. including sending kelley shirtless photos of himself. >> okay, two things. first, what does this woman smell like? is it a heady mixture of ambrosia and crack? is she the spawn of marilyn monroe and a bottle of axe body spray? three sex scandals from this

woman. and second, kudos to anonymous silhouette guy on that shirtless photo. he's been working out. >> after two years of relentless poll analysis, electoral map swiping, undecided voter dial testing and being forced to use the word "cuyahoga" in a sentence, we can finally take a breather. just relax with a nice soothing cup of chamomile breeze and just let it all -- >> do you think it's too early to talk about 2016? we don't think so. [ bleep ] you! [ cheers and applause ]

>> pretty much the show's motto right there. >> the means to the end of randi kaye. >> when we come back, moderator of "meet the press," david gregory. governor ed rendell and s.e.cupp. keep it right here on "morning joe." [ male announcer ] when it comes to the financial obstacles military families face, we understand. at usaa, we know military life is different. we've been there. that's why every bit of financial advice we offer is geared specifically to current and former military members and their families. [ laughs ]

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whether the people intended or not, we've got divided government. >> you don't think there's a mandate here. >> i don't because then they would have put nancy pelosi in charge of the house of representatives. see, i think these ideas that we talked about, i think they're popular ideas. this was a very close election. and unfortunately, divided government didn't work very well the last two years. we're going to have to make sure it works in the next two years. that means, i think, that both parties have to talk to each other. >> but could you see yourself supporting a plan that raises tax rates on the top 2%? >> i'm not for raising tax rates. i do not support raising tax rates. >> period. >> yeah, i've been saying that my entire career. >> welcome back to "morning joe." i'm mike barnicle holding down the fort for joe and mika who

will be back. john heilemann is still here, unfortunately, for me, right next to me. it's just a question of which one of us is going to drive this show into a bridge. >> or either one of our careers. >> i know. also joining the table, the director of the earth institute at columbia university, economist dr. jeffrey sacs. cohost of "the cycle," s.e. cupp and former governor of pennsylvania and political analyst and unfortunately pathetic philadelphia eagles fan. >> yeah. >> ed rendell. >> how true. >> you know, before we start -- congressman ryan, you just saw him. >> yeah. >> you just heard him. >> yeah. >> graveyard whistling. >> go ahead. >> that's basically what i was looking for, whistling past the graveya graveyard. we'll get to that in a second. we'll start this hour with the fiscal cliff where the white house is showing its cards and sending a message ahead of the president's face-to-face meeting with republican congressional leaders on friday. the president plans to open

negotiations by calling for $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenue over the next decade. that amount is likely far more than republicans would be willing to accept and double the amount that speaker boehner offered the president during their debt negotiations last year. today the president is scheduled to meet with ceos from a dozen companies including general electric, ford and ibm to discuss ways to work together and find a balanced approach to reducing the deficit. during a closed-door meeting yesterday with union leaders and liberal supporters, president obama reportedly vowed that he would, quote, not budge when it comes to letting the bush tax cuts expire for the country's highest earners. labor leader and president of the afl-cio, richard trumka, was among those at the white house meeting. he says he and the president are on the same page. >> we're very, very committed to making sure that the middle class and workers don't end up paying the tab for a party that we didn't get to go to. the president led with that

notion of protecting the middle class, and now you have republicans that have it in their power, they could sign a bill tomorrow that protects the middle class, and we'll see what they can. are we going to push them on that? without a doubt we're going to push them on that. are we going to collectively stand up and make sure that workers get a fair shake in all of this? absolutely we are. do we believe that the president is committed to that same thing? absolutely we do. >> s.e., off of richard trumka saying that and off of the obvious reality of the election results, where do you think congressman ryan is coming from? does he not hear the country when it comes to the bush tax cuts? >> well, he's in a tough spot. i think not only does he feel like he has to defend the last campaign, he's also looking ahead to maybe a future campaign of his. and i think he's in a unique position to have to sort of toe the line. and i'll give him credit, he didn't in that clip say, i absolutely will not vote one way

or the other. he said, i'm not going to negotiate this right now. but i have always personally felt this way. look, the problem is that this whole thing is a dog and pony show. it's a dog and pony show from start to finish. democrats are not going to agree to any package that doesn't raise rates. and i think if you're going to make it a dog and pony show, at least make it a believable one. the president should be meeting with club for growth and heritage and all kinds of people to make it look like he's actually considering a balanced approach. he's not. and republicans, for their side, don't need to pretend that they're going to be soft on this. they're not going to be soft on any of this. so i think we're all sort of watching the show. in the end, democrats have the leverage. they have the distinct advantage. and they're probably going to get what they want. >> how do you -- you've dealt with city counselors in philadelphia, state legislators in pennsylvania, you know, many of them opposed to you on specific issues. how do you go about getting everybody in a room with people, you know, you just are opposed

to their view? >> i think you've got to understand what the needs are of individual politicians. and for the republicans to vote, to give you enough votes to raise the rates and do a package of fairly robust revenue increases, they're going to have to need the president to own this. the president, i don't think, can sit back and say, here are my basic principles. you guys work it out. the president has to lead. he's got to own it. he's got to say what he wants to do. that gives the legislators a little bit of cover when they go back home. and he's got to do that. i do think that it is an achievable thing to go over. and business is going to play an important role. i know, mike, you know that judd gregg and i are the co-chairs of a thing called a campaign to fixtures the debt. we've raised 36, $37 million from businesses to do a public relations campaign to support this effort. and business has to deliver the

message to the republican legislators. business has to say, look. we want this fixed. we don't want it fixed in a little way. we want it fixed in a significant way. and that means spending cuts and it means we've got to raise significant revenue. >> no, it means significant tax reform as well which no one is calling for. >> everyone's calling for that. >> we're not there. s.e., your point about balanced, we don't what the president is proposing on spending cuts. he had proposed a 3-1 ratio. so we don't know where he is on that issue. >> hopefully today we pin him down. >> although he's got a very specific tax, to your point, ed, about having to lay out a specific marker. he's put that marker down, whether that's a mostly negotiating strategy or not, we'll see. but jeff is, you have a column in the "f.t." about this very issue, about what america's tax rates need to be. you know, it seems to me on the basis of the president's victory and the exit polls that show that two-thirds of the country is in favor of taxing the rich more stiffly than they're currently taxed seems to me the president does have a mandate on

raise it upper rates. where do you think we need to be in economic terms in terms of the tax code to get where we've got to go on fixing the american economy broadly? >> he won the election and the senate came in for the democrats very strongly. and i think what ed said is exactly the point. the president needs to put forward a plan. he hasn't done so, actually. even on the taxes where he's been explicit that okay, we're going to raise the taxes on the rich. he hasn't really put forward a plan. but even more, he hasn't put forward an overall budget framework. that's key. and unfortunately, the way we do things in this country, why are we endlessly in this same at-the-cliff negotiation for the last four years, because there hasn't been a framework that's ever been put forward, and it's very hard for people to interpret what these numbers mean. you look at "the wall street journal" headline today. that obama sets steep tax target. steep, $1.6 trillion over a

decade. who can interpret that? let's just parse it out just for a moment. >> well, you have, like, a ph.d. in economics. you might be able to. let's give it a go. >> it takes a little bit of long division, and that is that $1.6 trillion over a decade is $160 billion a year. we have about a 1. -- about a $16 trillion annual economy. so what's called a steep tax increase turns out to be 1% of our national income. now, our budget deficit is 7% of gnp, so this is saying steep tax increase, one-seventh of the way to close the deficit. without in framework, nobody can understand the games, the numbers, the bells and whistles. when you say it's unbalanced, i have to disagree. we don't even know what it is, first of all. but almost everything still is pointing towards significant cuts. and i think cuts that would be pretty devastating, actually.

>> you know, jeffrey, when you say nobody understands this, i hesitate to correct you, but you're wrong because we have david gregory. we have david gregory. >> there we go. >> he understands everything. >> i know he does. and that's great. >> david, with your mathematical wizardry and your background in calculus and everything like that, please explain to us the president's framework that he will no doubt explain in public later today. is there a framework? >> i think there is a framework, and i actually agree with heilmann, if there's a mandate, the for tax increases and the president is clear on that. here's where i think the president's going to operate differently. up until now and especially in the grand bargain negotiations that failed, he was working an inside game, a very inside game, and it didn't work. i think now he needs much more of an outside game. he's just off a campaign which he won. he's won re-election. that campaign has to continue around these budget talks where he goes to the american people and says, this is what a balanced approach actually looks like.

this is the game. this is the pain. and everybody's got to get on board with this. he can't just have simpson and bowles who are still going around the country. these guys are like justin bieber going to the mall. when they go around the country and talk to business groups or just regular groups of people saying, hey, guys, this is what it takes to balance the budget. that has to be the president now laying this out. and i think he's laying the groundwork for it in a significant way, not only keeping his left flank in check, but by meeting with business leaders which he'll do today. i think they are a natural ally here. you see in all the major newspapers, the ads that these business groups are putting out to do something, to do something now. they don't care if they're paying more in taxes as long as it's part of a budget-busting enterprise, a deficit-reducing enterprise. and you know, he finally has an opportunity to repair that relationship with the business community. and i think they help him get some of the leverage. >> chuck todd's also with us. chuck, let me ask you a cosmetics question.

today the press at his press conference -- >> reporter: i think he will wear makeup. he usually does. i don't know what brand, but i think he will, like all of us do in television. >> we have this question of the fiscal cliff and the future economic health of this country that everyone is concerned with at one level or another. what are the odds that we don't even -- that we don't get to these issues until about 20 minutes into this press conference because we're preoccupied with general petraeus? >> reporter: well, you're asking a sort of trick question here. and i say that in that is one of the people who i would hope gets an opportunity to question the president earlier rather than later in the press conference, i mow what my intention is. look, i think it's going to be -- i think you're going to see a lot of reporters, and david knows this trick, where maybe you ask a quick follow-up on one, but i really want to ask you about the fiscal cliff on the other. i have teased on that. no, i actually do think there's

not much -- you know, there's sort of one or two questions that i think should be asked about this, particularly, is the president happy with how he got this information from the fbi? there's a couple of legitimate questions on that. but i actually don't expect the press corps to linger on this. there's too many specific questions on fiscal cliff. for me, the number one is, are you willing to go over the cliff if you don't have this -- if you don't get what you want on tax rates? and the president is -- i'll tell you, they are adamant that they are going to decouple the bush tax cuts temporarily for next year and that rates are going to go up on those making over $250,000. they believe that's a mandate that they got. they believe there's no reason for them to back off on that. they'll put plenty of other things on the table, but that to them is a, you know, no-compromise position on that front. so how does the president -- i know some senate democrats

believe the president needs to express -- needs to sort of instill that fear in the republicans that he is willing to let things go over the cliff if he doesn't get his way on this because even though behind the scenes everything i understand is the president's not. so we'll see. i'll be curious how he talks about that. >> like, let me just say in terms of the press conference, the reality is not only are there going to be a lot of petraeus questions, are there going to be more benghazi questions over the fallout over libya, the fiscal cliff. there's also going to be straight reaction to the re-election. there's a lot of pent-up energy in that room about being able to ask the president some serious questions and get him on the record on all of these issues. >> reporter: eight months. >> eight months. back to the fiscal cliff, without giving me a migraine headache, what happens if we go off the fiscal cliff? what happens? >> well, taxes go up more than they should suddenly.

then we negotiate afterwards a more reasonable solution. and i don't think in that sense that there's anything irreversible, and i think the president would go to the cliff and over because it could be rectified. but i think the real point that i'm trying to make, which in our country, we are having a hard time with, you can't make a budget at a press conference or an announcement of one thing or a showdown over one issue. a budget actually needs a framework. and every other government i know, the government lays out a proposed framework. that we still don't have in this country. we are always playing a game on one issue. the debt ceiling or the top marginal tax rate or $1.6 trillion over ten years, very hard to interpret, in general. and we don't have a framework. and i think what david said, what ed said, i want to repeat, in our system, the only place that a framework can be proposed is by the president.

and if we saw that framework, the public would rally around it, actually. this is his chance. an inside game is a loser for really doing serious things in this country. >> hey, chuck, i think one of the areas in which maybe the two worlds could collide today, defense and fiscal cliff, is if someone asks the president about that promise he made in one of the last debates, that the sequestration defense cuts will not happen. do you expect that to come up today? >> reporter: absolutely. you know, the white house's solution on sequestration is they say, hey, if you let the rates go up, if you decouple the bush tax cuts, let the rates go up, everything else becomes easier to deal with. sequestration, everything. and then you create a second -- by the way, sequestration may not go away in this respect. while on the defense cuts, it will. and they'll negotiate their way out of it. by the way, nobody -- what the president said and if you remember, his staff walked him back. but what the president did was commit a washington gaffe.

i accidentally spoke the truth. sequestration is not going to happen. nobody wants it. and so the question is, how is it part of the bigger deal? and everybody i've talked to on both sides of the aisle on this, they think that that is the easiest thing to deal with. that there's plenty of -- that whatever they agrow on revenue side, that that's going to pay for the sequestration. >> hey, david, it's heilmann here. i want to come back to a point you made a second ago about the notion of -- >> he knows you. >> -- about the notion of the outside game. you know, one of the things that liberals on the left would always say in the first four years of president obama's term was that, you know, he was too quick to compromise with republicans. either he's too quick to compromise they'd throw up their hands. how do you deal with these republicans? they're just against everything. if you think back on previous administrations, one of the other things that other presidents have been really good at doing is breaking the back of

intransigence, by making the other side pay a price for being intran intransigent. do you think the president understands the way he can win is to raise the political price for republicans not being willing to compromise in a way that's favorable to his priorities? >> i do, but i still think that's risky. i mean, i think that was a lot of the campaign, frankly. what he started to do with, you know, proposing some jobs bills that were met with opposition right away. and he was able to build up all of that tension in the course of the campaign to say here's where i stand. here's the way they stand. i think the fact that he seems to be a bit agnostic about how you get to new revenues. in other words, he keeps -- he does not keep stressing an increase in marginal tax rates. that's a natural place to start in terms of what he believes. but, you know, you saw glenn hubbard in "the financial times" yesterday saying look, you can do this through eliminating some tax deductions for the rich. that was a romney plan. he could absorb that.

there's groundwork to be laid for him to say, look, this is how much i need in revenues. i don't care how we get there. that's a natural opening. so i guess my answer, john, i'm just not sure how much of that brinksmanship he wants to play. but i think what is certain is that he wants to very early define the terms of this debate, make it very public and say, this is the framework that is reasonable. this is what i'm putting forward, and not get into a situation where he then, after it fails, says, well, this is what i proposed, and let me leak all these documents. this is where we were. i think they want to be done with that and be very up front what they're prepared to do. >> what were you mumbling? >> he's always muttering one thing or the other. >> he cannot say, this is the number i need. you guys get there. he's got to, as jeffrey said, he's got to put out the framework himself. and remember, raising the top 2% doesn't get us where we need to go in revenue. we've got to do something else. it has to be a plan. >> exactly. >> chuck, we're going to get to your level of outrage over the miami marlins and jeff loria a

little later. >> reporter: he's got to go, i'm sorry, baseball is responsible for that mess. you don't give owners free teams. this is how they treat the city. >> i agree with you. i agree with you. >> reporter: they gave them a free team. that was an outrage. >> so corrupt. you are so corrupt. >> chuck is with me. >> barnicle is so corrupt. this is all about him being annoyed about the blue jays getting fat in this deal. that's all this is. he's so corrupt. >> unfair to barnicle. >> david, thank you for your clairvoyance, as always. >> see you guys. >> chuck todd, thank you very much. we'll see him on "the daily rundown" at 9:00. next, democratic senator dick durbin from the great state of illinois joins us in a couple minutes. and later, academy award-winning director oliver stone will be on set to discuss his latest project. you're watching "morning joe" brewed by starbucks. [ male announcer ] humana and walmart have teamed up

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capitol hill from the sensible side of capitol hill. the democratic senator of illinois, senate majority whip, senator dick durbin. senator, how are you today? >> i'm great, mike. how you doing? >> i'm doing very well. could you give us, in your mind, a head count of the number of republican senators who you think now, after the election, would be amenable to cutting a deal so we avoid going over the fiscal cliff, in the senate? >> oh, i'd say over 20. and perhaps that number has grown since the election. the election was a pretty straight-up question as to whether or not we were going to raise taxes on the wealthiest people. the president won the election decisively in the electoral college and with the majority vote. so i think that many republicans believe that now's the time to sit down and talk about revenue. >> that's a good thing. >> absolutely. senator durbin, do you think --

do you look across -- the house has been more of a problem all along, whether it was a summer ago in the grand bargain negotiations and continuing forward, are you starting to see signs looking across the other side of the hill that there might be more room for negotiation with house republicans, too, or do you think they're going to be as big a problem as they have been in the past? >> there is a great distance between the senate and the house, even though i served in the house for a number of years. we look far off in the distance and say, what are they doing over there? and i guess basically it comes down to the question as to whether speaker boehner is willing to work for a bipartisan answer to this deficit issue. if he is, we can achieve it. it's the only way we can achieve it in the senate. but if he wants to make it an exclusively house republican product, it's not going to get done. >> senator, this is s.e. cupp. what are you hearing about "the new york times" co-opting that romney/obama idea to cap deductions at $35,000, you know,

approved by the third way group? is there any truth to that, or is that sort of just bogus dog and pony show? >> i have no idea whether it's on the white house agenda, but it's been part of our discussion. because we understand that if you take a look at the tax expenditures, $1.2 trillion a year, there's room to save money and reduce the deficit. and if you say to the highest income categories that they are going to have a cap on their deductions, that's one of the ways to approach it. what we want to do is to make sure, at least from my point of view and the president's, that we protect middle-income families from tax increases. that's why the $250,000 level has been drawn. >> senator, it's jeff sachs here. good to see you. i'm wondering how we avoid being at this negotiating table basically every month for the next four years and really have a framework that we can live with as a country? because this has been nonstop now, really, for the last four years. what's the time line to get to

something that is more sustainable? >> that's exactly why we have a fiscal cliff. just by way of a reminder, it was voted on -- proposed and voted on -- by both democratic and republican senators and congressmen. it was supposed to be so awful and so onerous that we couldn't delay it. and i think that's the way we ought to view this. december 31st is a deadline. i hope we can do something in the lame duck or soon thereafter. the president is adamant, we're going to get this done now, we're not going to limp along with more tea party threats of shutting down the government and economy. it's not good for the american people and workers across our nation. we're going to use this fiscal cliff as the catalyst to come to a conclusion, to an agreement. i think it's the time to do it. it's long overdue. >> hey, dick, it's ed rendell. how are you? >> i'm great. >> dick, i'm talking about our guys in both the senate and the house. you know, because you voted for simpson-bowles which i thought was extremely courageous, but you know that there are a lot of the spending cuts.

let's assume we get a good revenue package. there are a lot of the spending cuts that a lot of our men and women aren't going to like. >> that's right. >> do you think we can hold enough of them to get this through? because i think in the end, the packages are going to require more democratic votes than we're going to get from the republicans. so it's going to be crucial to hold our guys for something that's going to administer a little bit of pain to our base. >> well, ed, you make a very good point. you and i share a belief, as the president does, that there should be an infrastructure piece of this. if we want to build the american economy in the 21st century, we need the roads and bridges, the broadband as well as the electric network across this country that makes a difference. that's part of the nondefense discretionary account. so what we need to do is to acknowledge we've made deep cuts already on the nondefense spending side. as painful as it may be, as difficult as it may be, the pentagon has to step up. they have to find ways to save money, too. and i think a lot of those on the left feel that we've gone too deep into education and other programs.

let's make sure this is balanced from this point forward. >> senator, before we let you go, switching topics a bit, i assume that much of today's press conference or a lot of it, too much of it, will be preoccupied with the two co-stars of "you've got mail," general petraeus and paula broadwell, but it leads to a larger issue, many people think, and that is the repeated deployments of the american military to afghanistan following on iraq and the impact it has on service families left behind and the war itself, the lingering 12-year war. what's your view on all of this? >> mike, you put your finger on it. we ought to talk about the real cost of war. it is not just in dollar terms. it certainly includes the terrible loss of life, over 5,000 americans in iraq and afghanistan. it means those who came back with injuries and the impact on individuals and families after the war is over. before we deploy troops again in any corner of the world, we need

to think long and hard about the real cost of war. we're seeing it with the suicide rate among returning veterans, for example, the unemployment rate is getting better, but still unacceptable. these are elements that came into my thinking when i voted against the iraq war. i didn't think they made the case strongly enough for us to go forward there. now we need to bring the troops home from afghanistan. the president has pledged to do it. we need to do it as quickly as possible. >> senator dick durbin of illinois, as always, thanks very much. coming up, a lot of things changed the moment hurricane sandy came ashore. among them, mayor bloomberg's plans for the future. we'll talk about that right ahead on "morning joe."

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welcome back to "morning joe." 'tis the season. the tree arriving at rockefeller plaza this morning. survived hurricane sandy, by the way. they taped up all the limbs in jersey as the storm came through. they were concerned sandy could also get this one. it didn't and it's going to be arriving and heading up shortly. ice skating rink is up and the

holidays are right around the corner. this is the busy travel time of year as we head towards thanksgiving. and thankfully we're getting a break from all those big, huge storms. there's only one little thing that's interesting that could be minorly destructive as we go throughout next week. there's an ocean storm. as of now, this is monday through wednesday of next week. it appears to be far enough offshore for only minor -- very minor -- consequences for areas that were hit by hurricane sandy. we're mostly concerned with new england up there towards massachusetts and cape cod, possibly beach erosion and coastal flooding. hopefully the trend will keep this offshore even further and we don't have to deal with it. this morning it's a quiet day. it's cold, it's chilly, but it is the middle of november now. there's very little in the way of any rain or snow on the weather maps to have to deal with out there. plenty of sunshine on the east coast after a cold morning. and anyone traveling to the west coast, no problems there whatsoever with temperatures in the 40s and the 50s. you guys going to work on your throwing skills again? it was a little rough last hour.

coming up next on "morning joe," academy award-winning director oliver stone will be here to talk about what he calls his most ambitious project ever. stay tuned. let's see it, guys. impress the ladies.

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joining us now and man, are we lucky to have him, chris smith. he writes about mayor michael bloomberg's future in light of superstorm sandy in this week's "new york" magazine. he writes, pre-storm, the mayor was attending to his day job, but he was also trying to

graduate from being a mayor of one big city to being something larger. a post-partisan national political force. it was a test drive for his future, then approaching his final year in office, bloomberg was suddenly in the midst of a week that could decide. every bit of him was on display, his strengths as manager and remarkable blind spots particularly when he insisted the marathon would go on as scheduled. sandy was his crisis, just as 9/11 belonged to rudy. meanwhile, in the background, bloomberg's quest for relevance and influence beyond new york churned forward. chris, i was struck in the piece about mayor bloomberg, he's so effective, so efficient, and yet the combination of the marathon and sandy, his persona, his presentation about things is so factual, so data-based, so direct, that a lot of people,

more people than i think prior tooth events occurring would see him and say, you know, does he really know us? does he really care about us? >> sure. you know, we're 11 years into bloomberg as mayor, and this is not new. he's had a lot of trouble identifying with the man on the street throughout that period. and there's a plus side to that. you know, when he's ramming through something like a smoking ban that initially was very unpopular, drew a lot of heat in the papers, but has saved a lot of lives. and because he doesn't care a whole lot about what the papers think and what polls say, he persevered through that. now, this was a little rougher and a little harder to understand. you know, he had staff telling him based on all the unhappiness, anger they were seeing on twitter, on facebook, that this was a real problem, that it mattered to people in staten island and brooklyn. he is a great believer in the big picture, in tourism as a huge revenue generator for the

city. he thought six days into the storm recovery, the marathon could be handled logistically. and to be fair, there were a lot more literal life-and-death decisions to be made at that point. and he didn't consider the marathon a high priority. it became a big deal. he eventually pulled the plug and moved back into dealing with the real important stuff. >> let me ask you a local question and a national question. and nobody has watched the mayor more closely than you have over the years at our magazine. you know, after the blizzard caught him out a couple years ago, he has been super overprepared in some ways for these kind of events, right? i think the analysis, the piece where everything of him was on display. rudy, big thumbs up, 9/11, history's verdict, rudy giuliani managed that crisis well. do we even have a verdict on bloomberg in this storm? do we have a verdict?

is it thumbs up? thumbs down? or are we still waiting to make a final determination? >> no, that's a fascinating and a smart comparison. in some ways they got the crises that fit their personalities. terrible tragedies, deaths in both. but rudy's 9/11 response required emotion. it required a rallying cry in a lot of way chz suit es which su a personality. despite whatever mistakes may have been made around the marathon is essentially a managerial crisis. it's dispersed. you need emergency response, food, hot water, rebuilding in a lot of different places all over the city which is the kind of thing that bloomberg has excelled at over time. you know, there were some bumps in getting the recovery off the ground, but this will take a lot more time. it will be a tougher story for the media to cover and for that verdict to come through both logistically, 9/11 was in lower

manhattan, hit a major new york industry. this is diffused in a lot of different communities that aren't as easy to cover, and it's a different story between the climate change and the actual damage around the city. >> you know, jeffrey, off of climate change, the idea that mayor bloomberg has been active in his belief that we should address climate change nationally for a long time, but we have sandy, devastating storm. and then a week later, we have a snowstorm, climate change, explain it in terms of its reality, of its omnipresence here in our lives and politicians' refusal to even think about it in real terms. >> well, of course, we have unbelievable instability in what used to be the most extreme events are now the normal events. and that's what we're seeing in heat waves, in doubts and floods, the ocean level has risen on the east coast by about a foot. and so we get the storm surges and the flooding much worse than before. i thought that the mayor's

endorsement of obama at the end in putting climate change into the front rank of the election was brilliant. where's he going to take that afterwards? >> very good question. this fall was a quick short test drive of his super pac. he targeted seven candidates and a handful of other issues, made a big difference particularly in california where he took out a five-term congressman who had been very pro-guns, you know, spent $3 million, gdefeated somebody, sent a message there. climate change, the mayor has been active on it for a long time in quieter ways. the obama endorsement was another big step. what's interesting is how focused he stays on this. he's going to give a lot of money through the philanthropy, the foundation that he's established, how much he pushes the super pac into races on

issues like immigration, guns or climate change, that's going to be the curious thing. >> i think it might have been politically brilliant for bloomberg for him personally, but i think he also suffers a little bit by direct comparison to chris christie across the river, where as barnicle said, you had sort of the cold tactician in bloomberg's response. you had this emotional dad response in chris christie. and whereas i think christie was unfairly criticized for politicizing the storm and getting chummy with obama -- not chubby. chummy with obama. that was unfair criticism. i think bloomberg's endorsement which by very definition is a political act was fairly criticized as being political and putting bloomberg's future maybe ahead -- >> sure. >> -- immediate concerns in new york city. >> but for reasons of substance, consistent with things he stood for in the past, you know, he's walking around in staten island

where people have been devastated. >> still are. >> yes. and if there was a final straw to push him to make, by all means, political endorsement but for substantial reasons, how much he concentrates on that, how much he focuses on that. i don't think he's even really decided at this point. he's going to have a lot of things going on in his post-city hall life and how high climate change ranks on that, we're not going to see for a couple years. >> you can read the piece in this new issue of "new york" magazine. chris smith, thanks very much for joining us. when we come back, best-selling novelist vince flynn takes us inside his latest spy thriller. it's like reading the paper when you read his latest book. keep it right here on "morning joe." lists all done. raise the roof!

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joining us now "new york times" best-selling novelist vince flynn. vince, his 14th book, is out right now "the last man." it features counterterrorism operative mitch. these things are like crack

cocaine. these books. >> that's going on the cover of the next book. >> but good for you. >> the amazing thing about this one it's afghanistan, it's a high-ranking official disappearing. it's all sorts of stuff -- >> it has an fbi agent who really has a you know what for the cia. it has a high-ranking military official who is having an affair with a woman in the state department, which you were talking about earlier. i know general tpetraeus, this whole thing caught me off guard. it's not -- i think the man, i said, he's not the first four star general to be a narcissist. >> true. >> he is more of a political general than like a kristol who was more of a war general. petraeus was youawfully quiet. i don't think he liked all the headlines he was getting. kristol went down and sat there

and didn't say anything. >> it's perfect that you're here. i have to ask, would you ever submit a pitch like this to your editor with all of these crazy, salacious details and expect to not be laughed out of the room? >> no. it falls under that category you can not make it up fast enough, and people, you know, you go back to david baldacci's book which is "absolute power." great book. he publishes that under reagan or bush one and it doesn't really sell. it starts out with the president having an affair with one of his top fund-raiser's wives. well, in the clinton administration, all of a sudden people are like, i can buy into that. you really do have a hard time staying in front of this stuff. but this one even caught me off guard because i think petraeus, even though the man had a massive ego, i thought he took his job very seriously. these guys are not politicians. we've grown to expect this out of our politicians, unfortunately. out of our military commanders, they have to adjudicate it over

countless people for this exact thing. and they have for very good reasons. one, it's not honorable to do this and they're a profession of honor and, second of all, you can't have people over in the theater of war be discussed earlier having affairs and, worse, when the fighting people -- let's say the marines, are in if a fallujah and their are back having sex with other men at the base. it's poisonous for morale. the military takes this very se seriously. >> does this inform in some way about some culture or subculture that exists? you've spent a hot of time traveling to those regions, something most americans obviously caught off guard about this should be better aware this exists in the highest ranks? >> i feel like we're better off not knowing some of this stuff, that these things go on. i'm more worried about the families and the kids and how all of that's continuing back here. this socialite in tampa, this is ridiculous. they should have smelled this

coming from a mile away. a lot of retired business women and men get in and help the families. they buy the kids' clothes. this gal is down there all she is doing is throwing parties and causing trouble. the whole thing stinks. a unfortunately, these are a couple of our brightest stars and they look like a couple of high school kids on facebook. >> where is the discipline? these are people who are designed to be disciplined -- >> and they're going to get disciplined. >> a total lack of self-control in these cases from the e-mails to the acts themselves. >> correct. i know joe was very upset and i get this. what is the fbi doing looking into this stuff because it is troubling. once it starts and you find out the keeper of your secrets is this reckless, i don't know how you stop. because if we can find out -- if some little shirtless fbi guy down in florida can find out,

trust me, the svd and a lot of other intelligence agencies have figured it out. >> that's one of the big elements of this, when you pull that string, that's a huge element of the story. our privacy. >> our privacy but let's be clear about one thing. when you become director of the central intelligence agency, you give up this privacy. you cannot do this stuff on it. >> we don't want to you get out of here without selling your book. >> that's okay. >> not that you need much help having sold 100 billion jillion books. talk about the book and talk about the parallels to the situation. i assume all your kascharacters behave more honorably and smarter? >> oh, no. god no. >> what goes on in this book? >> when i sat down to write this book, what i wanted to capture was the fact that we are about to do a tactical withdrawal out of afghanistan. and in the military it's one of the hardest things to do. the brits did it famously when they left afghanistan a couple hundred years ago and lost

everybody on the withdrawal. it was easy to see we were going 0 to have this green on blue violence. and so when i started writing it, that wasn't the story. it's in this book and there's a lot of it. and there's cia men running around with bags of cash trying to buy off warlords which touches on benghazi a little bit. that's what happened that night. we tried to get the local militias to come in and save us. ultimately -- and this gets a little too much attention. people feel like the cia and the fbi hate each other. they don't. there's elements within both organizations that hate each other. 10%, 20% navy. by and large they work well together. they're after the same thing. but you won't get the occasional really aggressive person who wants to make a name for themselves in washington, which we've never seen that before, and they just -- they go after it. >> vince flynn, i'm telling you "the last man" his latest. great stuff. >> thanks for having me on the show. coming up, film director ol 0 i ever stone. also, president obama gives republicans a preview what

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headlines? president obama is scheduled to hold his first post election news conference expected to face a barrage of questions about general david petraeus' admitted affair, the time line of this fbi investigation, and when exactly the president was told about it. meanwhile, the white house says the president still has faith in general john allen, the current u.s. commander in afghanistan, who is now under investigation by the pentagon's inspector general from what officials skra as potentially inappropriate e-mails with one of the women directly involved in the case. nbc's chief foreign affairs correspondent andrea mitchell has more on an ever widening story. >> reporter: the scanndal involving two very different women, tampa social yate jill kelley, and petraeus biographer and former mistress paula broadwell ensnared not only petraeus but his successor. marine general john allen, who took over from petraeus in afghanistan, and is the president's choice to be supreme allied command earp of anywnato

forces in aurp. a nomination now temporarily on hold. the general is married with a sterling record, but on a flight to australia monday night, aides to defense secretary leon panetta disclosed a dramatic turn in the petraeus case. fbi investigators uncovered what the pentagon called potentially inappropriate communications between the general and jill kelley whom he and his wife got to know in tampa and were reviewing between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of documents. including e-mails over two years. officials say some were flirtatious, but the general strongly denies an improper relationship. the fbi discovered the e-mails during its investigation of kelley's e-mails sparked by her complaints about anonymous threats which turned out to be from paula broadwell. they say they found no wrongdoing by general allen but turned the files over to the pentagon which monday ordered its inspector general to investigate. a social link between the two four star generals, jill kelley,

who enjoyed socializing with the powerful in tampa while doing volunteer work for military families. she also gave people the impression she had some kind of state department status which officials say she does not. in fact, last weekend she called police complaining about media visitors including nbc. at one point invoking diplomatic type privileges. >> i am an honorary consul general so i have inviolability so they should not be able to cross my property. i don't know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well. >> reporter: kelley's friendships had benefits. petraeus and allen both wrote letters to the court handling kel yae's twin sister's bitter child custody case to vouch for the sister. another friend of kelley's, the fbi agent who helped launch the investigation that eventually force 0ed petraeus to resign. he is now the subject of an ethics inquiry after the fbi found he had sent kel yae piley

pictures with his shirt off. >> that was andrea mitchell reporting. lawmakers are defending -- or demanding that petraeus testify about the deadly attack at the u.s. consulate in benghazi which he independently investigated. by the way, we'll be handing out the license plates at the end of the broadcast. >> you can park right next to the ballpark. >> an honorary consul general. >> this is one of the few that you can get on demand like watching homeland or something like that. it's an amazing story. you were shaking your head, though. >> i must admit, i'm mesmerized by this. this is a week we're supposed to be all talking about the fiscal cliff, the deficit. but the reality is talking about the fiscal cliff and tax reform is a bit like eating spinach. you know it's good for you. you ought to do it. it's actually hard work. now the equivalent of nonstop ice cream sunday daes. it is fascinating and a lot of

fun to watch but very tragic in many ways. >> yeah, tragic is an understatement. there is a war going on in afghanistan. people's lives are still in peril. american lives and afghan lives, and this is what we're talking about. the president has a press conference later today, correct? >> 1:30 eastern time. during "andrea mitchell reports." >> what's the over/under in terms of time when someone finally gets to something substantive like withdrawal from afghanistan? like the fiscal cliff as opposed to paula broadwell, general t petraeus, in terms of questions? >> i predict our colleagues will play a game of chicken and, in fact, start with fiscal cliff and serious stuff. >> john is not as optimistic. >> i think the fiscal cliff will come on the fifth question. >> that's going to be the spinach, isn't it? >> the first couple questions on the fiscal cliff. >> someone reached out to me and said just consider had mitt romney ron, been president elect right now, he would be focused exclusively on the economy. it would be like president elect for a day and a half and then a

sex scandal breaks out. that would have been interesting how he handled that moment. >> the other aspect of the story that i assume the country will get to, the media will get to quite quickly, is the surveillance tape. i mean, this is pretty scary stuff. i mean, some of your e-mails to me and some of my e-mails back to you, i don't want anybody reading them. >> that would be bad. >> interesting the surveillance tape, the architects caught up in the surveillance tape. that's the thing that's so fascinating about it. >> one of the fascinating details is the degree to which broadwell and general petraeus went to lengths to try and stop the e-mails from being traced by using a system of saving in the draft folder in their e-mail accounts and stuff so they were clearly aware of the risk of being watched and yet they still went ahead and sent e-mails on an extraordinary scale. and you have to ask questions about these are people who are trained in intelligence matters

and yet even they can't forget about the dangers of using e-mails. >> neither one of them knew a 15-year-old who could have told them how to get around having their e-mails discovered. >> "wall street journal" has some of the fresher reporting today on it this including some of the things about the e-mails for those interested in every detail i recommend you pluck down whatever it costs. some information about like the names on the accounts. >> the level of preparation for this show is fan ttastic. >> the importance of "the wall street journal." according to "the wall street journal" -- according to "the wall street journal" miss broadwell writing under the sued anymore kelly patrol, that was the email address. >> kelly patrol? >> one word, capital "p." >> i think people think e-mails d disappear when they hit delete. clearly that is not the case. >> that's the incredible thing.

you would have thought people who were as intimately involved and sophisticated as these people are who are aware they had something to hide would also have taken -- done some rudimentary googling on the question of how difficult it is to get -- to delete e-mails, that you get them out of the cloud. they're on g-mail. it's not classified but it's not secure. it's a service owned by another company where things disappear. you think some of these things get archived? this is not a group of high iq people when it comes to the technology that they were using to try to evade the surveillance tape that they built. >> the other thing i found amazing, i remember going to the u.s. treasury in the height of the financial crisis and back then you had officials who were scribbling down facts and figures on scrap paper because that was one of the few things they were able to legally throw away and get rid of. and if you go around other br

branches of the u.s. government today, people are intensely aware of the risk of e-mails being kept. if you go and talk to private sector banks, nobody who is working on a bank trading floor these days can possibly not be aware of the risks of tracking e-mails. and somehow the military seems not to have noticed this. it is very, very striking. >> there's one other detail in "the journal" story i believe is fresh which is according to "the journal" kelley, miss kelley, tried to get the fbi to drop the investigation after she initiated it. she had second thoughts and people said she made the request, quote, because she was worried about the personal information being provided to investigators. >> like the diplomatic license plates. >> talk about the horse leaving the barn door. >> you predicted fiscal cliff would be the fifth question. it's our second topic. the white house is showing its cards and sending a message ahead of the president's face-to-face meeting with republican congressional leaders on friday. president obama plans to open 0

negotiations by calling for a $1.6 trillion in additional tax revenue over the next decade. that amount is likely far more than republicans would be willing to accept and double the amount speaker boehner can offer the president during their debt negotiations last year. today the president is scheduled to meet with ceos from a dozen companies. there are some of them on your screen. general electric, ford, ibm, all playing a part. they'll discuss ways to work together and try to find a balanced approach to reducing the deficit. during a closed door meeting yesterday with union leaders and liberal are supporters, president obama promised he would, quote, not budge when it comes to letting the bush tax cuts expire for the country's highest earners. labor leader and president of the afl-cio was among those at the white house meeting. he says he and the president are on the same page. >> we're very, very committed to making sure that the middle class and workers don't end up paying the tab for a party that

we didn't get to go to. the president led with that notion of protecting the middle class, and now you have republicans that have it in their power to sign a bill tomorrow that protects the middle class. we'll see what they can. are we going to push them on that? without a doubt we're going to push them on that. are we going to collectively stand up and make sure that workers get a fair shake in all of this? absolute ly we are. do we believe that the president is committed to that same thing? absolutely we do. >> also congressman paul ryan is dismissing suggestions that president obama's victory gives his administration a mandate to raise taxes on the rich, returning to capitol hill yesterday for the first time since the election. ryan pointed the republicans keeping control of the house as a sign that the country isn't sold on the democrats' agenda. take a listen to this. >> whether people intended or not, we've got divided government. >> so you don't think there's a mandate here? >> i don't because then they would have put nancy pelosi in

charge of the house of representatives. i think these ideas we talked about, i think they're popular ideas. this is a very close election. and, unfortunately, did divided government didn't work well the last two years. we'll have to make sure it works the next two years. that means, i think, both parties have to talk to each other. >> but could you see yourself supporting a plan that raises tax rates? >> i'm not for raising tax rates. >> so you won't support a plan? >> i don't want to get into negotiations with you but i do not support raising tax rates. >> period? >> i've been saying that my entire career. >> the fiscal cliff -- i mean, there are people, you read them, you hear them, let's go off the fiscal cliff. that may be one way to resolve the situation. what happens if we go off the fiscal cliff? what is the fiscal cliff? i can't even balance a checking account. what is it? >> it's more like two and a half cliffs because you have three things happening in the next few months. you have the bush-era tax cuts expiring, you have the obama stimulus tax cuts expiring. you've got the a collection of

the spending increases coming into force and you've also got -- sorry, the spending cuts, and you've also got the debt ceiling in the sense that congress is going to have to get permission to issue more bonds and those three things coming together create a very nasty shock. and essentially if you do nothing, if you let the spending cuts happen, if you have the tax cuts roll off and you have tax increases, you're going to hit this worth about 3% or 4% of gross domestic product and that will will almost certainly push the economy back into recession. so there's an awful lot at stake here right now. and what paul ryan just said is very interesting because we have an editorial on monday from glenn hubbard that romney's economic adviser essentially saying that, yes, we recognize we need to talk about tax increases for the rich. i mean, he actually stressed that should be the starting point of their discussion. he didn't say, hubbard, that he increases -- he wants to see increases in tax rates.

he was looking at closing loopholes, things like that. but he was willing to put that on the table. the problem, though, is even if advisers like glenn hubbard are saying that, what we're seeing is people like paul ryan very much signaling strong opposition to that idea. >> what is your head count in the senate, the number of republicans? >> in the senate? >> yeah. >> i think the senate will pass whatever the leaders agree to. i think lake with most of these things now they'll have to go to the house floors without knowing they'll have the votes and the question is who can you lose and still pass it? you'll lose some moderate -- some liberal democrats, but i think you're going to get a base support of democrats and the question is you'll have to have boehner and i think you'll probably have to have candor. can you lose paul ryan? anyone who wants to run for president in 2016 is going to have to vote against this on the republican side. the question is, who do you need? and i don't think you absolutely need paul ryan.

in the end, i think they'll vote for what's passed even with tax raises. >> do you hear anything about nancy pelosi is going to have a news conference, a press conference later today? what do you think she's going to do? any word? >> i have no idea. no idea. >> thank you for your honesty. go get me a cup of coffee. >> did you watch this program yesterday? deborah wasserman schultz saying she's staying. most think she's staying and i think her body language yesterday when she was sparring with the press a little bit suggests she's staying. and if we're wrong, i won't be here tomorrow. >> let's go back to congressman ryan. the interesting thing president obama did yesterday, he's been criticized -- was criticized a lot from a lot of different angles in the first four years of his time in office. one of the things that the left and some of the center criticized him for was constantly negotiating against himself, you know, that he was not tactically speaking a shrewd negotiator. as much as anything yesterday was an announcement. he's not going to get the tax

cuts, the tax increases that he wants, that number. but he's not coming in -- he's coming in resetting the bar really high on the assumption he'll have to end up lower which is how most people do conduct negotiations generally instead of starting at what you want and getting it pared back. congressman ryan, i don't understand how you can not understand the president's election as a mandate for raising taxes on rich people, only because the president campaigned almost nothing else specifically. there were very few specifics that we criticized president obama throughout the campaign for not being specific. he was very specific about that. he not only won re-election in a convincing way but if you look at the exit polls and, again, i know congressman ryan doesn't want to look at the exit polls because they're brutal for the republican side, the exit polls 0 showed overwhelming support for that proposition, raising taxes on rich people. two-thirds of the country is in favor of it. there's not much that there's a clear mandate for out of this election besides that. >> elections have consequences.

>> the key issue is, it's one thing to say, yes, we want to raise taxes on rich people. the critical question now is how. are you going to raise rates by letting the bush-era tax cuts expire or are you going to try and deal with loopholes? and it matters because raising rates is a very fast way of getting in more revenue. you can get that money in quickly. talking about changing loopholes is a very messy, long discussion, and that could take a long time. and if you think back to 1984, it took about two years to get serious reform of the tax code implemented even when you have a fairly cooperative atmosphere. if the debate shifts to plugging loopholes this could drag on a long, long time. >> the critical question is paul ryan and other republicans, do they ever look outdoors and realize what people are doing with their lives? do they understand what's happening on the street? apparently not off of his comments. >> bill kristol now, you hear, glenn hubbard.

that's a lot of republicans getting in on this idea. when we come back the untold history of the united states. oliver stone and renowned historian peter kruznick. a look at u.s. history. later comic actress and director p penny marshall takes us behind the scenes of some of her biggest hits. but first, here is bill karins again with another forecast, the same as the last forecast, still wrong. bill, try again. i hope this one is right. it's a nice one. too bad this wednesday isn't next wednesday. of course next wednesday is considered the busiest travel day of the year right before thanksgiving. we'd love a beautiful day like this. look at these airports. all the major hubs to the eastern half of the country. temperatures are chilly but it's just a gorgeous day out there. it's a fall, crisp morning. it's a little cold but lots of sunshine is going to be had on the east coast and through the middle of the nation. there's no rain or snow to be talked about. the best chance of any showery

type weather would be north floor had floor down to orlando, daytona beach. into jacksonville, savannah and charleston. it's just a nice, tranquil weather pattern. this is what we need across the country and even into tomorrow a weak storm pushes off the coast with a few showers out there. and that about dozen it. nothing too hazardous. now barnicle is throwing like softballs at me. we've upgraded. what's next? soccer? is basketball? football. we haven't talked about the marlins either, that florida thing -- heilemann is throwing bananas now. we've lost all control, joe and mika. all control. we're looking outside, the tree is here. it will be going up soon at the rock and it arrives on the plaza moments ago. you're watching "morning joe." we're brewed by starbucks. [ male announcer ] humana and walmart have teamed up to bring you a low-priced

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we are going to propose, among other things, a forgotten set of heroes. people who suffered for their beliefs, who have been lost to history because they did not conform. and we are going to debunk some of those heroes that you believe in not with malice but by restating the facts. unless we remind ourselves of the good that we have lost, it's not easy to imagine a better future. by showing you the patterns and behavior which have come to be that you perhaps have not noticed before, we will try to bring you back to the meaning of this country and what so radically changed after world

war ii. there have been some profound mistakes, but we still have a chance, i strongly believe, to correct them. >> that was a clip from the introduction of show time's untold history of the united states, the so-called classified look at the history of the american empire. joining us now are the two men behind the series and the companion book, oliver stone, and professor of history at american university professor peter kuznick. i watched the installment last night on showtime and there's been, you know, some controversy about it with people saying you're distorting history. what is the big deal here? it was fine with me. >> i'm glad you liked it. we worked very hard on it. we've been at it for four and a half years. the facts there have been fact checked by showtime and also by cbs corporate. it's been thorough. you can argue with the

interpretations but the facts are solid. >> which interpretations so far -- >> there are several. in that chapter -- we have ten chapters and there's quite a few myths that we go after. one of them is that we, the greatest generation, we won world war ii. america was the victor, comes out in all the books, the greatest generation, band of brothers, stephen ambrose's "private ryan." we're saying the soviet union absorbed the german war machine. tore the guts out of the german war machine. they were moving along the southern flank and taking far fewer casualties. >> stalingrad. millions died. >> 27 million in world war ii. the u.s. lost a little over 300,000. during most of the war the soviets were confronting 200 german divisions.

the u.s. and british were ten combined. we don't know that history. >> what is striking and i've only seen the one installment but just in this discussion about the shrussian front for t germans, we continue to have as americans, i think, this myopic look at the world. like in vietnam, the vietnamese didn't ask us to come to their country. afghanistan, they didn't ask us to come to their kcountry. we view everything -- >> you got the point of our ten chapters already but that's good. we emphasize that point throughout. we try to point to it. the myths that we're building to world war ii is, of course, that we did not have to drop the atomic bomb on japan. and that comes clearer by chapter three. and there's also, of course, the smith about the british -- there's another big three card game going here, the british

empire, the u.s. and russia, and how these three played geopolitically behind the scenes. >> when i saw the title of this, it makes me think of howard. i know you have done a lot of research. how important, a geeky history question, but how important was that back to forming the guts of what you have done? it's probably the most pom lar and influential a.m. tern tiff history of the united states ever written. >> it's a different kind of book than howard's book. we are both friends with howard and he was very excite d about this project. we miss him and we're building on him but in a different way. howard was talking about social forceses have shaped america. he's talk iing about domestic issues more. what we're talking about is, first of all, the american empire and, secondly, the rise of the national security state. so in some ways howard's book and our book are perfect complements, the two sides that tell the entire story together. >> i'm wondering if, you know, one of the points of this is to say u.s. presidents especially

in wartime have trampled on the constitution and international law and certainly we have evidence of that. i wonder if you think our current president has received too little criticism from the left on drone programs. the motto is what drone program? judicial killing, et cetera. has he gotten enough scrutiny from the left on that? >> peter, i think, i agree with you on that. >> we were very critical of george w. bush surveilling americans. obama has been targeting and killing people without judicial review which is a much more serious crime. obama actually goes over and chooses the people who will be targeted by the drones. so we think that's a lot more serious. has he been criticized from the left -- >> do you have an alternative for that action, though? >> well, we're tracing the roots of the problem.

we should never -- our mistakes in afghanistan date back to us creating these people in the first place who are now fighting. >> we're there now. >> they were trained with american textbooks. we taught them jihad. the problem with american policy is move more deeply rooted. you have to go back to the roots and fundamentally transform it. the atomic bomb is the beginning of the crisis. that's 1945. bombs that certainly did not have to be dropped. six of america's seven five star generals and admirals who earned their fifth star during world war ii said the atomic bombs were either militarily unnecessary and morally reprehensible. we start with that and trace policy through the cold war. for us it's a question of the mistakes that we've made so we can stop doing them in the future. >> oliver, let me ask you a question, you've been making movies for a long time now, 30 years. ish. and you are, of all the marquee

american filmmakers, you've taken on historical topics more than anybody. if you think about jfk, nixon, all the things you've done. >> bush, too, w. >> somewhat fictionalized form, this is more documentary. place this in the context of that career, and what you're trying to do here because it is a body of work that seems to me to have a coherence to it. >> getting older. getting older, john. you attack these things in drama, are that's one thing. i'm very proud of it. you have actor sets. people say that's not what really happened. with the documentary you can go to the hard truth. these are the facts. how you interpret them you can argue all day. the beauty is i can bring out the whole story i've lived through. i was born right after the atomic bomb in new york city. we were told we were the good, we were the right. and as i've gotten older through vietnam experience and beyond

and seeing all the '70s, i didn't turn against my view until 1980, that period, and that's when my work started to flourish, ironically. i feel strongly the american experience i know has been ignored, not told, and not taught in schools. now my daughter and my two sons who went through -- my daughter is 17 now. she is in high school. there it says atomic bomb dropped on japan because the japanese were fanatics and we were trying to save american lives which is partly true but there's a far bigger truth ignored. she is not taught that. that bothers me. because that's what i was taught, too. >> well, you know, anything that gets people thinking more about history, reading more about h history, watching more history is a net plus because i agree we do not teach history very well. >> kids are poured by it and actually they're lower in science and math, lower in history. you in why? they know the story.

they think they know the story and they hear the sanitized story. lynne cheney and those people managed to do that. all the school boards, blah, blah, blah, they cut the real horror story because they don't want the kids know their leaders do bad stuff. >> oliver stone, peter kuznick, thank you very much. "the untold history of the united states." it is airing on showtime. new episodes premiere on mondays at 8:00 p.m. and they're during the week. i saw it last night. what is today? >> wednesday. >> so it was tuesday night, yeah. >> the longest day of my life so far. sitting next to you. up next, joe, mika, and willie's conversation with comic actress and director penny marshall. keep it right here on "morning joe." into their work,

their name on the door, and their heart into their community. small business saturday is a day to show our support. a day to shop at stores owned by our friends and neighbors. and do our part for the businesses that do so much for us. on november 24th, let's get out and shop small.

penny marshall made a name for herself in the 1970s playing the role of laverne in three different tv sitcoms. and with the tivo premiere dvr you can see all episodes with just a few clicks. nobody finds your entertainment like tivo. joining us now actress,

director, producer penny marshall. she's out with a new memoir, my mother was nuts. >> funny. >> it's a touching tribute. >> you know what, penny, i bet in a way it is a touching tribute to your mother. >> well, it is. wasn't your mother nuts? >> of course. >> they're all nuts. >> but it's degrees of nuts. so how nuts was your mother? >> she was pretty nuts. but she was very funny. so my whole family got their sense of humor from my mother. you had to or you'd kill yourself. >> and you got your first big break actually as oscar madison's whiny sister on "the odd couple." what a great -- but your brother, you talk about sticking together. your brother kept casting you in this reoccuring role -- >> no, i pitched -- i pitched "the odd couple" and then came bronson. asked him if he wanted to do it. i didn't know. do you want to do "the odd couple"? who are you?

penny. i said, my brother is doing this and so he ended up doing it and then when they went to mul multicamera, because it was one camera the first season, they added more characters and so he needed a secretary. why don't you get your sister? she's the one who got me into this. >> right. >> so i became oscar's secretary and i go, i just whine. that was my character. i whine anyway. >> what a classic and then, of course, from there to "happy days" to "laverne and shirley." >> my brother called and said, what are you doing? will you do "happy days"? cindy could play opposite because they were good. you could do it with henry. she doesn't want to do it for either one. we were getting $30 a week. we said, we'll do it. and then fred silverman, who is head of abc at the time, wanted spinoffs. so i'm like, what about two

little bottle cappers from milwaukee? so that's how we became -- virginized, by the way. because we put out on "happy days." prime time of the '70s. so we had to become virgins. >> it wases so huge. not being virgins in the '70s but actually "laverne and shirley" and "happy days." >> "mork and mindy." >> every week we were watching them. i'm sure you were watching them. i mean -- >> those were the defining shows for a lot of people of that era. it was funny because you have things like my father was from milwaukee and you could watch those shows across generations. kids were watching them, adults were watching them. they were period pieces. >> so it doesn't matter. and it reminded people of their childhood and we were poor. that's what's going on in our country now. we needed to work to make a

dollar. >> acting versus directing. you are the first female to direct a movie that grossed over $100 million. and i remember -- remember when you first got into directing, laverne, come on 0. she's going to direct? is. >> i know. >> and it's amazing what a great run as a director. >> i didn't ask for the job. you know, everyone directed on "laverne and shirley." cindy did, michael did, i did. the camera coordinator, anyone -- how many doors can you come through? and there was no video. >> the guy off the street bringing in coffee. do you want to direct this week? >> do you want to direct this week? come on. we knew where we were going by then. and so those hours are unfathomable. and then by accident "jumping jack flash" came. i did multicamera. and so i said, my brother said

they'll pay you to learn. i did it. i went through my phone book and bought him friends. i have a good phone book. >> fast forward to "big." he what a great movie. "a league of their own." >> you look at the cover -- i know you say you're a basketball fan more than a baseball fan but you got her with the catcher's outfit. can't resist there's no crying in baseball. >> which there is. there's crying in every sport. >> what a great run. >> it's the 20th anniversary of the movie and it's coming out on blu-ray. i wanted to say that. >> here you go. here is what tom hanks says. penny marshall has lived a life few of us could survive. did you know she gave me two of the best jobs i've ever had? of course not because when she talks she's barely comprehensible. read her memoir and you'll come to love her as much as i do. >> well, i was talking into a tape recorder. i can't even understand myself. i mumble.

and so i wave and i do this. my brother and i both speak in half sentences. and so tom, go, to the thing. in "big" that's tv and movie actors, i saw this baby corn. i want ed to come. and he went -- i don't have to now, what's my motivation. he knows what i'm talking about. >> the new book is "my mother was nuts." p penny marshall, thank you so much. a pleasure to meet you. >> will you buy it? >> it's fun. yeah. >> i'm going to. >> actually yeah. >> get everybody out there buying it. >> give you a job doing something. >> i like that. >> what does this mean? >> we can do that. thank you so much, penny. more "morning joe" after this. did you know that penny marshall was one of the final actresses up for the role of gloria bunker on "all in the family"? the role that would go to sally struthers. if you search cable tv and the

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there's the tree. it's moving. look at that, the tree has arrived. i feel better already. >> the thanksgiving tree, the holiday tree? look at that. that's a big tree, man. that's a big tree. we're going to go across the river right now, though, to cnbc's brian shactman. brian, how do you think the street is going to react to the outrage that took place last night with the miami marlins dumping their team and thus enhancing the blue jays prospects in the american league east? let's get right down to it. >> i think heilemann said it

best and, barnicle, i'm a die hard sox. the sox dumped $250 million in payroll, the marlins do it and it's a travesty. i think, and you said it, when the owners meet, they're going to get on the owner of the miami marlins for taking $400 million dollars from miami and gutting the team after one bad season. it probably should not be allowed but it is bud selig and it will be allowed. >> the tribute of the free market, if it affects the red sox, all of a sudden, it should not be allowed. >> i have a double standard. i have a daughter. i have plenty of gender double standards coming to bear now that i have a daughter. i'll freely admit to the double standard. listen, talk about some standards. a couple quick things it in the economy. some data points, markets are shootly higher. we had retail sales down more than expected. part of that is auto sales were weak because of hurricane sandy and wholesale inflation was

actu actually down which is interesting. and we're focused on the obama news conference just like you are. we can't admit we want to hear some of the answers about the petraeus affair but are focused on the fiscal cliff commentary and the $1.6 trillion. we know it's a starting point, but where do we go from here? finally, barnicle, you can sell your facebook shares. 800 million shares coming to market. it's just a huge lockup period expiring. a lot of these people are not making as much as they thought. >> general petraeus had used facebook instead of e-mail that stock might have gone up but that's a question that there's no answer to. brian, thanks very much. >> all right, guys. up next, senator scott brown weighs in on his election loss, the future of his party and what may be next for himself. ♪

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middle is, quite fang rankly, t most powerful group. they can actually get things done. so i'm hopeful we'll be a more tolerant, open-minded party. >> that was incumbent senator scott brown of massachusetts calling on his party to move to the middle as you heard. brown lost to challenger elizabeth warren. there is now speculation that brown could make another run for senate if president obama names senator john kerry to his cabinet, senator brown is rumored to be a contender for massachusetts governor in had 2014. but brown insists his immediate future is focused outside of politics. >> there's no vacancy that i'm aware of and my biggest job now is to make sure there's a smooth transition from my office to the senator elect's office. there's not an opening right now for governor nor is there an opening for senator. but there is an opening for a dad and a husband, and that's the role that i want to play.

>> wrote today about the future of conservatism. you say the challenge between self-reflection and cannibalization. >> for all the talk of the civil war within the gop, i just don't see it and it certainly doesn't have to happen. i think self-reflex is good and conservatives need to talk about what just happened. they also need to remember that they didn't bother explaining to anyone over the past four years why conservative politics work. they were on defense for four queers talking about obama this, obama care that. they didn't explain why their policies were better. that's what conservatives have to do going forward. >> and continuing in the self-reflection department, up next, what, if anything, did we learn today? are you ready for this? i'm meteorologist bill

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the stones, rolling stones. still going 50 years later. what did you learn today? >> i learned today that the honorary consul license plates jill kelley adorns are 50,000 available for purchase today. >> governor? >> nobody thinks the american education system teaches history well. i do. >> you do? >> a little bit. >> you're in the minority. >> whenever joe and mika are away the cats will play and poor bill karins got the worst of it today. >> he always does. >> i learned two things. that your dedication and